If radio towers are your thing, this calendar's for you

Sunday

Nov 24, 2013 at 6:00 AM

By Aaron Nicodemus

When I think of good photos for a calendar, I think cheerleaders, dog of the month, kittens, Cape Cod shoreline shots. My mother and daughter make a calendar each year full of family photos that's a welcome gift.

But Scott Fybush, a public radio journalist in Rochester, N.Y., has been making a side living since 2001 printing a calendar chock-full of beautiful shots of ... radio and television towers.

"Yes, you read that right," announced a snappy press release. "Prettiest radio towers."

I thought it was a joke. But it's a real business. In his best year, Mr. Fybush sold 1,000 calendars, to radio enthusiasts all over the world. He usually sells about 800.

For the month of May in the 2014 calendar, the radio tower and transmitter building pictured under a bright blue sky is the WTAG site on Shrewsbury Street in Holden.

"One of New England's oldest surviving AM transmitter sites is also one of its prettiest," Mr. Fybush wrote in a blog post on his website, fybush.com. He also runs a subscription site for radio devotees called Northeast Radio Watch.

Pretty radio towers, huh? It's an eye-of-the-beholder thing.

The art deco WTAG transmitter building, which sits at the base of four AM radio towers, is unique, he said. Most radio tower sites are just a collection of metal poles with a brick building to hold the transmitters. The sites are often fenced off, as well.

Built in 1936, the WTAG radio tower and transmitter building site is wide open, with a welcoming road leading right up to the front door. I can see beauty among the guide wires.

The site has changed hands several times. Once owned by the Telegram & Gazette (hence WTAG), the site is now owned by Clear Channel.

Mr. Fybush has gone all over the country to find unique and different transmission towers to photograph. Sometimes, he calls ahead and gets a tour from the radio engineer, which he did when he visited with WTAG's chief engineer Dan Kelleher in 2010.

"There are not too many sites that are left from that era," he said. "These towers, they are neat pieces of industrial archeology. And what's even more amazing, they are still doing what they were built to do. How many printing presses can you say that about?"

Not many, I would guess.

I have written many stories over the years about neighbors vehemently opposing the construction of towers in their backyards. But those are cell towers, Mr. Fybush argued, not AM transmission towers.

"To my eye, a lot of cellphone towers are really ugly," he said. "A lot of (cellphone) towers, they are just antennas slapped onto a metal pole. These towers, they have some grace to them."

He also argued that these towers add something to a neighborhood, not detract from it.

"When they're working in harmony with the neighborhood, they can provide open space in places that would otherwise be overrun with development," he said. "There's usually plenty of room around the towers; people can use that space as a kind of park. And there's no traffic. They are more than just a necessary evil."

Other towers in the 2014 Tower Site Calendar include the former site of KBRT, an AM station that broadcast from California's Catalina Island until this year; the home of Chicago AM 1160's four-tower array in Des Plaines, Ill.; a master antenna system built in 1986 in Crestwood, Mo.; and the city of Tulsa, Okla.'s oldest surviving radio station, KFAQ, which launched Tulsa native and radio legend Paul Harvey.

In the years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, public safety officials have gotten mighty testy when people start snapping photos of bridges, buildings and other possible targets. I asked Mr. Fybush if anyone ever bothers him while he's firing off shots of a radio tower.

"There was one incident in North Carolina, right after the Iraq War in 2003," he said. "I was taking photos of a site not too far from a chemical plant. A guy in a pickup truck came out and asked me what I was doing. I explained, but he had already called the police. I had to show them my business card, and explain myself."

I learned something else in the reporting of this story. There is a makeshift museum of old-time radio equipment in the WTAG building. Only a select few radioheads have ever seen it, though. In an email, Mr. Kelleher, the WTAG engineer, said, "It's a great place to display old radio stuff. I have given tours to Cub Scouts as well as WPI and QCC students."

You can order your very own 2014 Tower Site Calendar, with the WTAG site posing provocatively as Miss May, for friends and family for $18.95, plus $3.50 shipping and handling, at fybush.com.

I can't think who I would give it to, though. Who deserves some coal in their stocking?